shamelessly biased blogging

A lot has been said of the big contribution of bloggers to counter-balance the bias of established media... a liberal's dream some say. But, don't you ever want to see some proudly biased blogging? I do:

The Dallas Mavericks are now in the NBA finals for the first time, and Mark Cuban is more proliphic than ever on is Blogmaverick.com blog. With the passion of an insider, with the obsession of a fan. worth checking out.

... and the fact that after leading 2-0 in Dallas their Miami games took the count to 2 for the Mavs and 2 for Miami heat only makes it more interesting

funny flash...

Sure: there are many flash animations flowing around the Net, but this one is special for a couple of reasons:

• It was ABC's videopodcast that seems to have made it famous. A sign of mainstream media catching-up? I don't think so... but they can try, nobody will get hurt
• It is really creative.. with sort of "the son of Dr. Frankenstein vs Dr. Frankenstein" tone, a flash animation fighting back its creator.. I guess experienced flash animators will have lots of fun with this
  

here it is: Animator vs Animation (you'll have to click on the "WATCH THIS MOVIE!" in the right). Author is Alan Becker. Great stuff, alan!

frustration...

Blogger was down earlier today for about 2 hours. How many thoughts stayed on the ideas limbo in that period?

pausing, rewinding and making your candidate accountable..

Debates between the top presidential candidates are a big modern institution. They are claimed by some to have played a big factor of Kennedy vs Nixon in the 60s... and now they are just another example of country-specific relevant content that is digitized, posted on youtube.. and that can be paused, forwarded...(or rewinded) as needed.

It would be interesting to see in 2 our 3 years specific videoclips of the promises, while making the elected candidate accountable for his/her promises in the past.

last night's debate for Mexico's presidency is available on 11 chapters in YouTube (the link actually starts on the part II, since the part I is even more of an ad).

For Madrazo, Calderón, and López this is a key photofinish.. for Campa and and Mercado probably their 15 minutes of fame. And for many mexicans abroad, and many non-live attendees, this might represent an interesting new medium to find out about their candidates ahead of the July 2nd elections.

As per the debate quality per se, IMHO: with 5 candidates on the debate, this is more like a staged fight. A good sales opportunity for political marketeers, but all those soft-balls are hardly a way to really see the candidates in action. At least rewinding and pausing might offer some chances to go deeper than the lean-back approach of watching it while sitting in the sofa.

Judson Laipply's 15 seconds of fame... more like 20M views and growing fast

Jason Laipply calls himself an "inspirational comedian", but he might be inspiring people with something more than his comedy.

His "evolution of dancing" performance on youtube reached today 20M views, and that's a testimony of the power of small guys posting their content on the web. That's more than the 18.1M viewers that the finale of Will&Grace had on TV on May 18th this very same year.. but they were a little-bit-more-expensive to distribute (just the W&G set occupied a space of 14000 sq ft).

and as mainstream media starts to cover Laipply's success more (the Washington Post did yesterday).. there's no sign of slowdown of the number of views in youtube on this video.

and now wormholes in the musicsphere...

Not that I had time to digest completely that SIP stuff that I mentioned on the last post... years of mankind knowledge processed somehow and it's essence turned into a map to navigate (thru SIPs) every book written (err.. ok, every book that Amazon.com catalogs, which gets close to that), and jump from book to book.

but I wanted to have digested that, since what I bounced with today was even more interesting. It's called last.fm It's hard to simplify evenmore how it works. You tell him an artist that you like, and just press FWD/NEXT: it will take you on a journey through the music industry passing by artists that are "similar".

That "similar" is troubling for me. Somehow this program and/or site is able to find the "essence" of my music taste.. and that is exactly what it uses to navigate. It really feels like jumping from wormhole to wormhole (sorry, last night I saw Jodi Foster again in Contact and the scene is still stuck in my mind) between songs that will most likely... like!.

scotty: beam me up to wherever my "essence" tells you that I would like. cool stuff!, hein?

Fingerprints in the booksphere.. and browsing over mankind's knowledge

SIPs: I actually saw them for the first time about one month ago.. but only today devoted some brain cycles to digest the potential implications that they have in the way mankinds' knowledge is organized (or at least the old-order of knowlewge, the one based in books).

Back then I was reading (err... listening in audiobook format) Seth Godin's "The Big Moo: Stop trying to be perfect and start being remarkable" and then stopped in an airline VIP lounge. While being lazy enough for taking by notebook out and connected into the hotspot, I found an idle PC and started browsing in Amazon (in the "anonymous-zone" that doesn't remember my history of book purchases).

That's whey I found them for the first time: SIPs are "Statistically Improbable Phrases". Since i-don't-know-when Amazon started cataloging on the books they sell these collections of phrases that seem to tell you in a single glimpse what a book is about, or at least the terms it usees.

An example might be useful: Pick a recent best-seller, like Friedman's "The world is flat" and search for that book in Amazon.com. You'll see that "reform retail", "call center operators", "global supply chain", "flat world" and "triple convergence" are some of the 15 SIPs listed for the book.

If what happened to me allows some liberal generalization of what might happen to you, I bet that SIPs will READ YOUR MIND!!! meaning: if you read the book and made a list answering "What are the key ideas/concepts of the book?" and then look at SIPs, there is quite a high correlation between the two lists.

But what does that mean? IMHO, SIPs "extract" the key information of the book in less than 200 characters [wow!]. Sort of defining the "essence" of a fingerprint (where the vortex is, concavity, etc. insted of a full scanned image of the fingerprint).

And here's another neat trick: if you click on the SIP (it is actually a hyperlink in that amazon search for anybook), you start navigating the booksphere using the SIPs are links between the books. That might have even more potential than the "people that bought this book also bought XYZ book" for cross-selling, or even better.. for accelerating the positive spiral of knowledge building that we call progress.